Sunday 13 April is Auslan Day, a day that celebrates the Australian Deaf Community’s rich language, history and culture.
The date for this annual celebration honours the date of the publication of the first Auslan dictionary in 1989 by Professor Trevor Johnston, a pioneering linguist and a native Auslan user.
The publication of the dictionary gave the Australian Deaf Community a name for their language for the first time and provided a linguistic framework that describes its rich visual-gestural grammar and lexicon.
The name Auslan was coined by Trevor Johnston in the early 1980s and in 1987 Auslan was recognised as a community language by the Australian government.
The theme for Auslan Day 2025 is #AuslanGain, recognising what has been gained by preserving the language to ensure that all members of the Australian Deaf Community have access to their first language.
Over 73,000 students are currently studying Auslan in more than 330 Victorian government schools. Auslan is the most popular of all languages offered in the Department of Education's Language Education program.
Read more here:
https://deafaustralia.org.au/auslan-day
